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Police militarization is already in Canada as surveillance on the rise

Police increasingly employ military strategy and tactics on both sides of the border

Police stand watch as demonstrators protest the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown on August 13, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown was shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer on Saturday.Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Images of a crackdown on protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the police shooting of a black teen have raised questions on both sides of the border about the so-called “militarization” of police forces. But one expert says it’s about more than just guns and body armour.

“The more interesting aspect of the militarization of the police is actually on the strategy side,” said Kevin Walby, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Winnipeg. He said police on both sides of the border are increasingly training with military-style tacticians, especially when it comes to situations like crowd control and, increasingly, surveillance.

“When it starts to resemble how military personal approach a battlefield… then that raises a question about the blurring of blue and green lines,” Walby said. He said forces increasingly turning to greater digital and physical surveillance are a type of militarization as well. In Winnipeg, he said the police often use a helicopter to oversee parts of the city that are considered more crime-ridden.

“Some people would suggest that kind of surveillance is evidence of this kind of creeping militarization,” Walby said.

“They use strategy and language to refer to supposed threats that resembles that military personnel use,” Walby said, pointing to crowd control tactics from events like the G20 in Toronto, where police plotted how to contain protests in a very militaristic way. He also pointed to the growing use of digital surveillance, whether metadata or otherwise, as a militaristic “creep” into everyday policing.

“The G20 was in many respects a military operation,” said Christopher Murphy, a defense lawyer who represented Adam Nobody during his trial over his role in those protests. “I would be categorically against the further militarization of police. it would not make society safer. I think it would have the exact opposite effect.”

Though that was four years ago, it remains a visible example of the type of equipment police across the country increasingly employ. Most recently, when Justin Bourque was loose in Moncton after shooting five RCMP officers, police employed armoured vehicles in his pursuit. Murphy noted that’s a unique example and perhaps one of the times police can easily justify such a high level of force.

Whether it’s increased surveillance since the 9/11 terrorist attacks or increasingly heavy-duty crowd control tactics, police forces across North America have been bulking up — and they say events like Moncton and increased terror threats justify their firepower.

“I think it’s happening but in different ways because militarization has so many different facets,” Walby said. “A lot of weaponry that’s used conventionally today, even Tasers…. A lot of those were developed first by military entities by other public or private bodies and then they kind of trickle down.”

Police in Canada do have a different approach than their American counterparts and are far less likely to bust out the big guns or sound cannons — officially known as Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs). Most Canadian police employ a community-based model that dates to 19th-century England and Sir Robert Peel. The Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police (OACP) updated its community policing model in 2013 and it emphasizes de-escalation.

“We think it’s very positive that this type of discussion is going on given the images that we’ve seen from south of the border,” said Joe Couto, spokesperson for the OACP. When the big trucks and riot gear do come out, he said police are simply responding to the situation at hand and an evolving society — a more concentrated urban population, for example, has made crowd control and urban policing more difficult.

“If a situation is a large public demonstration you’re probably going to see police officers in different gear because that’s what it calls for,” Couto said.

“The normal police officer is not using the types of equipment you’re seeing the images of on TV,” Couto said. “We don’t bring that out for traffic stops; we don’t bring that out for general patrol, which is the bulk of what we do… We police based on the situation.”

But the comparison between the tools that police use to quell crowds and the tools that soldiers use at war persist. In fact, as police ramped up their presence in Ferguson, MO., soldiers who had recently completed tours of duty in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan compared photos of their war gear with police gear. The comparisons are startling.

The general consensus here: if this is militarization, it’s the shittiest, least-trained, least professional military in the world, using weapons far beyond what they need, or what the military would use when doing crowd control.